At 3 in the Morning

A red double-decker,
A black cab
Whizz past her
In a dazzling blaze of colour,
Honking, clamouring
Past the traffic signal
On a busy street.

Shoved, pushed,
By disembodied elbows,
And other bodily extremities,
Covered in what appear to be
Summer coats, jackets, sweaters,
In varying hues of dark and light,
She is hurled towards
The edge of the pavement.
A car rushes past,
Nearly running her over…

She awakens—
In a dark, cool room
A few thousands of miles away.
It’s quiet outside,
As a night should be.
Only a cat’s howl,
Or is it a peacock,
Punctuates the silence
In her concrete street,
Not too different
From the street in her dream.
The clamour of that busy street roused her.

That street from her dream,
That entire city,
It’s so close, and,
Yet,
So far away.
Unreachable,
Yet so accessible.
It seems to exist in a different dimension,
A different space,
A different time.

But it exists.
In real, but,
She doesn’t dream about it.

The city of her dreams,
Is different:
Captured in a time capsule.
What she sees, hears, smells, and touches,
Had existed only a few years ago.

Things would’ve changed by now.
The real city would be different now.

Knowing this,
The apparent discrepancy
Between reality and unreality,
She turns to her phone,
To check what time it is.
The luminous screen shows it to be
Three minutes past three,
In the morning.

She lies down again,
Vaguely conscious
Of having travelled
Back and forth
In Time,
And, in Space—
Without a time-travelling device—
As she has been
Wont to do
Since her return
From the city of her dreams.